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62 Language Diversity in the Classroomappreciative of Grant’s work, writing to the author and referring to hisbook as a ‘bible’. Many writers have pointed to the lessons that the Nazislearned about the implementation of ‘eugenic’ ideas from the Americanexperience; Black (2003) and Bruinius (2006) provide quite thoroughtreatments here. Roberts (2008) discusses eugenics and its Nazi implicationsas part of his new monograph on historical views of human beingsas animals. Baum (2006) charts the rise of the idea of a Caucasian ‘race’;along the way, he presents useful information about the inevitableconsequences: conceptions of racial superiority and inferiority, eugenicmovements, restrictions on immigration, and so on.While attention to the domestic population actually preceded thatgiven to newcomers, comparison soon began to be made. In 1855,Edward Jarvis had found that the proportion of immigrants in lunaticasylums in Massachusetts was greater than that of the native population,the ratio being about 5:4. Jarvis’s study is notable for two reasons: itwas the first American work to consider the relationship betweenimmigration and mental illness, and it demonstrated that poverty wasthe mediating variable. That is, since there were proportionally morepoor immigrants than poor natives, and since asylum inmates tended tobe paupers, then it was to be expected that one would find moreinstitutionalized immigrants than their overall population numberswould suggest. This second feature of Jarvis’s work is of greatimportance, for it refuted any simplistic correlation between beingforeign and being mentally ill. And yet, for many years afterwards,xenophobia and racism, coupled with eugenic enthusiasms, neglectedthis all-important clarification in favor of a more brutal and more directcorrelation between immigration and feeble-mindedness. Thus, otherstudies of ‘settled’ immigrants that found apparently higher rates ofmental illness often attributed these to ‘psychopathic tendencies in theconstitution of those who emigrate’ (Portes & Rumbaut, 1996: 163). Rareindeed was the enquiry that gave any consideration to traumas ofupheaval and relocation, or to the fact that new-world experiences wereoften less than favorable.Several recent overviews have illuminated the impact of eugenicthinking on American programs meant to screen and, in someinstances, to compulsorily sterilize the ‘feeble-minded’. Kline (2001)demonstrates the broader social conceptions of sexuality and morality atwork here (conceptions that we have seen probed in recent debates overhuman cloning). Stern (2005) focuses on the eugenics movement inCalifornia, where more than one-quarter of all involuntary Americansterilizations occurred, and one of her chapters discusses ‘quarantine and